Novelty metrics in engineering design
Lorenzo Fiorineschi, Federico Rotini
Abstract
In the field of design, novelty is widely acknowledged as a key parameter for creativity assessments. Accordingly, scholars have proposed several definitions, metrics and procedures to assess novelty for different purposes. Although the availability of many alternatives allows researchers to perform in-depth investigations, it makes the orientation among the available combinations of novelty concepts, types and metrics quite hard. In such a manifold context, the aim of this work is to map the literature about novelty assessment in engineering design. To this purpose, a systematic literature review has been performed on the Scopus database to identify a relevant set of contributions through specific search strategies and skimming processes. A map of novelty metrics has been obtained, which shows that most of them belong to the uncommonness type, while others need further investigations. The obtained results are intended to support scholars in browsing the different metrics, when selecting the most suited for their specific research objectives.